Sunday, November 05, 2006

A few early questions....

I have already received a number of questions about the meeting, and although I'm not really in a position to answer them properly yet, I thought that I should at least put this up so that the information is out there.

Registration feesWe hope to get a grant from the University and / or the museum to help to cover our costs for the meeting. However, negotiations are at a very early stage. We are also unsure of the costs of producing the special volume from the meeting and we also hope to make a presentation to Peter and are waiting to hear what this will cost.

As a result, we do not know the expected costs of the meetings, how much of this will have to be met by registration fees, and how many attendees we can spil the costs between. In short, we don't know. However, I would expect this to be in the same region as other similar international meetings (SVP, PalAss, SVPCA etc.) and so should be easily affordable for both professionals, students and interested amateurs etc.

Obviously when all of this has been finalised I will send out the likely costs so that you will all know well in advance.

Hotel costsI will try and get some prices from some of the hotels and hostels listed. Depending on levels of interest and people's budgets we might be able to negotiate a discount if we can boo a large number of rooms in a single hotel. I will add more whan I have heard from the relevent places. In the meantime, here is the link to the Munich Tourist Office which provides some more options.

Specimen accessThe Thusday (13th) of the meeting has the entire afternoon reserved for viewing the Munich specimens. Of course there should also be some opportunities to see them during lunches, breaks and at other times during the meeting. Those who are here on the Monday before registration, or on Friday (instead of taking the field trip) will also have time then.

Dino Frey has very kindly offered to bring a number of his specimens over from Karlsruhe as well so these will also be available during the meeting.

If you are staying in Munich for the week before of after the meeting, it should also be easy to arrange with Oliver Rauhut (the vertebrates curator) to see our pterosaurs and other specimens.

Meeting FormatThe meeting will take place over 3 days (Tuesday 11th to Thursday 13th) September 2007. Registration will be possible on the Monday beforehand (10th) with an ice-breaker party for early arrivals. Registration will also be possible on Tuesday morning.

Tuesday and Wednesday will consist of 20 minute oral presentations. The Wednesday lunch will be extended to allow a brief poster vieweing session.

Thursday morning will have two open forum discussions for about 90 minutes each. Topics are TBC but will probably be on "Taxonomy and Phylogeny" and "Functional Morphology" in pterosaurs. Thursday afternoon will be open for an extended poster session and to allow participants to view the Munich museum collections.

Friday will be the field trip to Eichstaett (see below). People not travelling will be able to continue their observations on the Munich collections.

'Field trip'The trip to Eichstaett (Friday 14th) will allow people to view the collections in the Jura museum. Dave Martill has suggested that it would be worth chartering a coach from the Jura museum to visit some of the Solnhoffen quarries and other local museums on the Saturday. Accommodation is available in Eichstaett both in the local hostel and the research institute there, so this is a strong possibility. As with all of the above, more information will be released when available. We need to examine possible numbers, transport costs etc. before we can give the likely costs of various field trip options.

However, the visit to the Jura museum on the Friday is a definite, and will go ahead. Transport will probably be by train and should cost only aroud 20 Euro return, so this option at least should be very cheap.

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